The Land of Forgotten Contracts

Most businesses can rattle off the major contracts they have, the ones they interact with frequently. But in general, many businesses don’t realize how many contracts or business obligations, they really have. If they do not have a policy of aggregating and tracking all of their agreements, they likely overlook (read: forget) many contracts and obligations.

Now, most businesses don’t wake up one day and say “hey, I think I am forgetting about contracts”. There is typically some event or action that brings to light that they are overlooking contracts and agreements. Do these sound familiar?

• There is a big financial event like due diligence and the executives says, “ can you gather all of the info for all of our contracts? How long will that take?”
• Annual budgeting comes around and the executives ask, “what is this and why does it cost so much?”
• You receive a vendor’s renewal letter and finance asks, “do we use this? Do we need to renew it?”
• The company “historian” stops by your office and asks, “hey I seem to remember us using this service, and do we still use it?
• Someone complains about service – “hey this service stinks, can we cancel it and get a refund or switch to vendor x ?”

If you have lived through of these events (of course you have), it is very common to find agreements and contracts that you never knew about or had just “forgotten” were in place. For many businesses, they have “the Land of Forgotten Contracts”. Stay tuned for part 1 of our multipart series on this topic.